This specification relates to providing time series information with search results.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, for example, video files, image files, audio files, or Web pages including content for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search system can select one or more resources in response to receiving a search query. A search query is data that a user submits to a search engine to satisfy the user's informational needs. The search system selects and scores resources based on their relevance to the search query and on their importance relative to other resources to provide search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered according to the scores, and provided in a search results page.
Often a user's need for information can be satisfied by providing time series information with search results for certain queries. As used herein, time series information is a sequence of data points associated with time values. The time intervals may be equal intervals (e.g., yearly) or unequal intervals (e.g., logarithmic intervals, intervals measuring fixed changes in a data value, and so on). However, such queries need to be identified as indicative of a request for time series information (e.g., that the user would be well served by having time series information with the search results).
Additionally, such time series information is usually not available in any single resource, but can be collected from a number of related documents. Extracting and organizing this information can consume many processing resources, or can require time-intensive manual labor. Finally, even if a user's need for information can be satisfied by providing time series information with search results, there may be little benefit for providing time series information for certain queries when balanced against the cost of generating the time series information.